ETA condemned as bomb explodes at post office

2 February 2006

MADRID – ETA and its armed political wing, Batasuna, were on Thursday again called on to renounce violence after a bomb exploded at a post office near Basauri.

Containing between 10-15kg of explosives, the bomb went off at 10.52pm on Tuesday night on an industrial estate between Basauri and the Basque village Etxebarri. No one was injured.

The newspaper Gara and the Association for Road Assistance, the DYA, both received warning calls at 9.40pm that a bomb was due to go off.

According to the DYA, the caller was a woman who was “young and with a nervous voice”, who said she represented ETA, but who did not specify the time of the planned explosion.

The police evacuated the area and searched it, finally finding the explosive package which carried a note, saying “careful, bomb”, like that used on several other ETA bombs.

The police force did not have time to deactivate the bomb before it exploded, damaging the building.

Justice minister Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar condemned the attack and promised to continue working on all fronts to guarantee security. He said the government’s policy on terrorism would continue until it obtained “the guarantee that ETA, which has been a nightmare which we have fought for almost 40 years disappears in a definitive manner from our lives”.

The spokesman for the Basque socialist PSE-EE group, Rodolfo Ares, said Batasuna had to condemn bombing. “If it really wants to play a role in politics, it has to stop justifying this type of act and sets itself out definitively as against violence,” he said.

This is the fifth ETA attack so far this year and the third in the Basque Country. The last explosion, on Sunday, at a job centre in Bilbao slightly injured a policeman.

The bomb came the evening after the Basque government’s prime minister Juan Jose Ibarretxe issued a warning to ETA and the government. On Wednesday morning, he said if the terrorist band and Zapatero’s government made no progress on the road to peace by September his party, the PNV and his political allies, the EA and the EB, would take “an extraordinary political initiative”.

Despite, the government’s efforts to encourage ETA to lay down its arms, with Zapatero signalling last year that Spain had its best ever chance of brokering a peace, little progress has been made.

Although there have been suggestions ETA is close to a ceasefire, last year and the first part of this year have seen 41 attacks.

[Copyright EFE with Expatica]

Subject: Spanish news